Organic Learning

For the past week, I’ve been at the Teach the Teachers Collaborative in Ojai, CA working from very early in the morning to very late at night for the entire week in a beautiful setting. It was amazing! Science teachers in Grades 4-8 reunited for a third year to develop content in science, thinking about ways to engage students using technology. The final product was a podcast episode for their unit of study. You can subscribe to the podcast at http://science-lausd.net/podcast/feed.xml . The podcasts are enhanced, so best viewed in iTunes, so the pictures can be viewed as slideshows through the artwork. The one thing I regret is that the Creative Commons, copyright, citations part of our workshop didn’t seem to get through to all of the participants. Something to work on next year. Still, the creativity in the content is wonderful. What a great start to the year. I can’t wait to see what these teachers will be doing with their students. If they allow their students to create this kind of content, WOW.

Our instructional team of ed tech coaches and facilitators worked together to show these teachers how to collaborate using Google Docs and Spreadsheets, social bookmarking through Del.icio.us, wikis, Google Earth, blogs, Flickr, how to use an RSS aggregator, and of course, how to create and publish a podcast. These teachers had an entire week to work with the tools that bring us all together. They were amazed and excited about the possibilities. Each edtech lead educator worked with a science lead educator to facilitate the learning in each classroom of 10 -15 teachers. What an amazing week!